Then there is the matter of how we should view Western civilization, closely linked to the other critical themes. It even put the Bad Orange Man into the White House, according to David Sanderson, who declares that:

Trump is in office because of the currents of 'Western civilization superiority' and radical Christianity.

… and he asks:

What reputable person denigrates everything about 'Western civilization'? Please name names.

According to Robert Tobias:

As someone who hails originally from South Africa I am all too aware how the 'tools' of Western Civilization may be used to destroy a range of identities. 

Andris Heks reckons that :

Islamic theocracy, CCP autocracy, and transnational Western autocratic capitalism all reject either formally or in practice the universal human rights

Opening Response

I suppose Trump would be surprised, and maybe a bit gratified, to learn that his ascension was backed by the whole weight of ‘Western civilization superiority’; and I don’t think I have ever talked about people denigrating ‘everything’ about Western civilization.

However plenty of people, in academia especially, have in recent times taken an overwhelmingly negative view of Western civilization. If David wants some names, I suggest he read the paper Civilization and the Self-Critical Tradition by Daniel Gordon, a historian at the University of Massachusetts, who identifies and responds to a long list of prominent figures in academia who have denigrated Western civilization, and indeed the very concept of ‘civilization’.

To see value in this tradition is not to paper over the negatives in Western history, such as slavery and colonialism. All major civilizations have negatives, not least Islamic civilization which from its inception embarked on centuries of bloody conquests that we hear very little about, in contrast to all the self-flagellation about the Crusades. As for slavery, the Islamic slave trade started long before the trans-Atlantic European slave trade, was larger in scale, and continues to the present day. You should also check out the massive trade in slaves taken from Europe by the Barbary pirates. 

But we never hear about that, do we, and least of all in the multitude of centres of Islamic and Middle East studies in the universities, dependent as most of them are on funds from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

What is distinctive about Western civilization, or as I prefer to call it post-Enlightenment civilization, is its self-reflective quality that provided the impetus to address past wrongs.

The historian Daniel Gordon put it this way:

The radical theorists discussed in this article have portrayed ‘civilization’ as a sign of colonial arrogance inherited from a hyper-rational and chauvinistic Enlightenment. In contrast, this article traces how a key term was born in the liberal atmosphere of the Enlightenment and generated an expanding space of self-doubt afterward. When we appreciate that a large slice of modern Western civilization is a critical inquiry about the meaning of itself, and when we recognize that the language of civilization helped create a public sphere of doubt even within the colonial enterprise, we can conclude that the radical theorists discussed in this essay are less than reliable guides to the contours of European cultural history.

This Enlightenment inheritance, leading to the ability to conduct a ‘critical inquiry about the meaning of itself’ is the most distinctive feature of Western civilization, perhaps its cardinal virtue, making possible the correction of historic wrongs like slavery, colonialism, and gender-based discrimination. According to the American sociologist, political writer and (non-identarian) leftist Todd Gitlin:

… the Enlightenment is, to paraphrase German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, an ‘uncompleted project.’ Crucially, it is self-correcting. The abominations that litter the history of modernity do not refute the value of the Enlightenment. To the contrary. They go to show that Enlightenment has to be fought for by those who believe in it, even when, as in much of the 18th century, it does not win popularity contests, and even when its practitioners commit gaffes.

The repudiation of this understanding of the Enlightenment has become a widely held tenet of the current academic orthodoxy. The Enlightenment is something to be reviled along with everything else about ‘white’ Western civilization. With this, the postmodern ‘left’ has, in my view, gone decisively over to the camp of reaction.

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